The Clothing Insurrection: It’s Time to Take On the Fashion Supply Chain

As one of the biggest players in the global economy, the fashion industry has a responsibility to help protect the environment. We’re commemorating this Earth Week by asking some tough questions about our impact on the planet and what we can do about it. We’ll also be profiling people and companies who are instigating change. We’re calling the series “,” and to kick things off, Maya Singer takes a look at the harsh realities of the fashion supply chain.

I used to have nightmares about plastic. Back in 2008, I spent New Year’s Day immersed in The World Without Us, Alan Weisman’s thought experiment about what would happen to Earth if the human race was suddenly raptured off the face of it. There’s a ton of fascinating data in that book—including some frightening facts about cats—but the chapter that really stuck with me was the one in which Weisman describes the giant garbage patches forming in ocean eddies. I’d heard about those, of course, but what I hadn’t understood was that the plastic products therein have a rate of decomposition that must be measured in geologic time. One scientist Weisman spoke to suggested 100,000 years as a good guess of how long it would take for most of the plastic trash on the planet to biodegrade. In the meantime, the plastic that finds its way to water is breaking down into tiny particles, which creatures such as plankton confuse with food. Plankton is the building block of the entire food chain. Today, in many areas of the world, plastic particles far outnumber the plankton found near the surface of the seas.

The World Without Us is one of the seminal texts of my life. It changed the way I looked at the world, made me see it in much the way I imagine the photographer Andreas Gursky does, as a vast machine of people and goods. I spent a lot of time, in 2008, worrying about nurdles—the 2 millimeter beads melted down to make plastic of all kinds—and preaching to people about compost. And because that was also the year I began my tenure at Style.com, I found myself taking a keen interest in the fashion supply chain.

“Supply chain.” The phrase is so vague, so neutral, it would seem to have been coined with the intent to make people’s eyes glaze over when they come upon it. What it refers to is the back end of any business that sells goods—the “chain” linking the source of component parts, the factories where those parts are made into buyable stuff, and the distribution network by which that stuff is delivered to consumers (or the stores they frequent). Back in ye olde days, the fashion supply chain was straightforward: A farmer shears his sheep for wool; a village weaver makes it into fabric; the tailor buys the fabric and sews a cassock for a local burgher, or whatever. I’m approximating, but you get the point. Then, you know, feudalism ended, the Industrial Revolution happened, Henry Ford invented the assembly line, globalization became a thing. Now, in the era of hypercapitalism, the typical fashion supply chain is vast and Rube Goldberg-esque. To wit:

“According to fashion theory, there are 101 stages in the supply chain, the first being ‘designer attends fabric show’ and the last, ‘order ready for shipment,’” writes Lucy Siegle in her book To Die For, a useful primer on the subject. The theory Siegle refers to, the one taught in schools, is actually very abbreviated: It leaves out the steps required to create the fabrics designers pore over at shows such as Première Vision, not to mention the hydra-headed distribution network that delivers apparel to stores. Farmers farm, weavers weave, dye-ers dye, cutters cut, sewers sew; goods are packaged and placed onto pallets and heaved onto cargo ships or jammed into air freight; they arrive at warehouses worldwide and go back out again, to shops or to shoppers buying online. Millions of people and metric tons of water, chemicals, crops, and oil are involved in the process that turns a designer’s fancy into a sensuous object hanging on a rail in a store. That’s the supply chain, and its labyrinthine totality is designed to make the satisfaction of consumer desire as frictionless as possible. I want that! Click. A couple days later, a package arrives on your doorstep.

In the era of hypercapitalism, the typical fashion supply chain is vast and Rube Goldberg-esque.

See what I mean about a machine? The modern industrial supply chain is fascinating, if—like me—it’s in your nature to be fascinated by that kind of thing. Everyone else seems to find the topic painfully dull. As Tom McCarthy wrote of the mysterious “Project” at the center of his recent novel Satin Island, the fashion supply chain “will have had direct effects on you…although you probably don’t know this. Not that it was secret. Things like this don’t need to be. They creep under the radar by being boring. And complex.”

So I’m going to try to make this interesting. Imagine Jennifer Lawrence. Better yet, imagine you are Jennifer Lawrence, star of an action franchise set in a future dystopia. In this world, the social norm is that you must purchase, on a regular basis, a particular garment—many serviceable versions of which you already own. The livelihoods of many people are staked on your buying and re-buying this garment. Then, one day, you—action heroine you—make a discovery. The factory where your society’s ubiquitous garment is made is spewing so much noxious matter into the atmosphere that the world could end if it doesn’t stop. The Hollywood version of this story would feature a villain—some masterminding despot at the system’s tippy-top, who could be found out and deposed. A kinder, gentler economic system would magically emerge, and you’d begin your reign as the beneficent queen of the land, some pretty-boy love interest by your side. The end.

Now imagine that the ubiquitous garment at the center of this Hollywood pic is: Jeans. That’s more or less the world we’re living in, we super-shoppers of the developed West. We are end users of a product—seemingly innocuous, but not—that we buy and re-buy without much thought. Because, you know, that’s just how it is. That’s what we do.

The impacts of the fashion supply chain are vast. For the purposes of space, I’m going to set aside discussion of humans and animals and focus solely on the environmental costs. Which is absurd—surely humans and animals count as part of “the environment?”—but unavoidable. A person’s mind can only boggle at so much at once. So, to return to the scenario above, consider denim. It is made from cotton picked from farms all over the world. The cotton is shipped back and forth across the oceans to be made into fabric, sewn, and dyed. Along the way, the average pair of jeans is treated with PFCs, chemicals that make material breathable and stain-resistant, and washed with detergents that contain alkylphenol ethoxylates, another hazardous compound. The whole process is incredibly water-intensive, from the farm up, and the carbon load from the shipping of the cotton to mills and the raw denim to factories is astronomical on its own. Then there’s the additional impact of the transport, by boat or train or jet, of jeans to stores. They arrive sealed in clear plastic bags, which are promptly trashed. At least cotton decomposes; those bags make their way to landfills, or perhaps, seized with a sense of adventure, out to the big Pacific garbage patch between California and Hawaii. How many pairs of jeans do you own? I think I’ve got about a dozen pairs, of which I wear maybe four.

A single pair of jeans is no threat to Planet Earth. But as Siegle notes in her book, “a staggering one-and-a-half-billion pairs of jeans and cotton trousers are sewn in Bangladesh every year.” And that’s just in Bangladesh. And that’s just jeans (and cotton trousers). Virtually every mass-produced fashion item arrives at our shores with a likewise Byzantine backstory. And in most cases, it’s the sheer scale of the enterprise that’s doing the damage. Our insatiable desire for cheap cashmere results in the overbreeding of goats in the Gobi, a delicate ecosystem quickly being denuded of the vegetation required to support animals like, well, goats. Over in India, the chromium used by low-cost leather tanneries has stained portions of the Ganges bright blue and rendered them pretty much devoid of life. Or, to shift the action to Indonesia and Brazil, spare a thought for that workhorse material, viscose. Viscose is produced from wood pulp, and thanks to the material’s omnipresence in fashion, it’s implicated in the destruction of huge parcels of rain forest. Friendly reminder: The rain forest is our most effective carbon sink, soaking up CO2 and breathing it back out in the form of delicious oxygen.

The problem with fashion, vis-à-vis the environment, isn’t with any one product or any one process.

This month, the Rainforest Action Network launched a new campaign, Out of Fashion, calling on 15 well-known brands to commit to making changes in their supply chain that would ameliorate forest loss. There are other initiatives in the works, as well: April 24 marks the first-ever Fashion Revolution Day, in which people worldwide are asked to post selfies with the content labels of their clothes as a way of challenging the fashion industry to become more transparent.

Meanwhile, a number of brands have started to take steps in the right direction. Levi’s has been spearheading the drive to make denim production more water-efficient, and the company has committed to phasing out its use of PFCs by July 2016. Elsewhere on the denim front, Pharrell Williams has partnered with G-Star to create a range made from yarn spun out of cotton and shredded plastic sieved from ocean trash. (I guess Pharrell has the same nightmares I do.) Kering CEO François-Henri Pinault has emerged as a thought leader on sustainability: He’s instituted sourcing and waste-reduction reforms company-wide, and established the Material Innovation Lab, which develops sustainable—or at least more sustainable—luxury-grade textiles. Among fast-fashion brands, H&M has demonstrated a sincere desire to clean up its act, launching a variety of initiatives under its H&M Conscious banner (which you can read about on its website) and pledging to use nothing but organic or recycled cotton in its clothes by 2020. H&M is already the biggest user of organic cotton in the world.

These efforts are all commendable. But there’s the larger issue, which is indeed one of size. The problem with fashion, vis-à-vis the environment, isn’t with any one product or any one process. Some of these are pretty effing bad, but it’s the scale of production that really matters in the end. An immense infrastructure has been devised to support a shopping culture in which we’re encouraged to buy more, more, more. Buy now; buy cheaper; buy constantly.

I’ll spare you the lecture about conscious consumerism. No doubt you’ve heard it before. Instead, allow me to pause to admit that I, myself, am entirely pervious to shopping’s allure. Just this week, I conceived an urgent desire for cropped flares, two embroidered cotton blouses from Madewell, and a shiny new pair of Birks. The flares I found vintage, the blouses I decided to sleep on until I could decide between the two, and the Birkenstocks I skipped because, you know, the pair I own will do. All of which I mention only to note that it felt like an act of real discipline to limit my purchasing. The whole process left me more exhausted than satisfied. I don’t think I’m alone in having that hollow feeling, contemplating my haul. And then—out of habit, really—returning to stores to look for some other thing that might fill the void.

Which is to say: I’m part of this machine. So are you. My Hunger Games reference above wasn’t idle; I have a theory that the current taste for dystopian fiction derives from the sense that we’ve all been conscripted into a system we don’t particularly understand and have no meaningful power to take on. I mean, where would you start? There’s no grinning villain here, just a tangled network of trade agreements, like the Trans-Pacific Partnership now under negotiation, far-flung farms and factories, and corporations pressed to deliver greater profits, year over year, to shareholders. The fashion supply chain is lubricated by cheap oil and cheap credit, and driven by the capitalist imperative to grow. Even designers who’d rather not are compelled to compromise on fabric and shift production abroad in order to deliver collections more cheaply and more quickly to more and more stores. And thus the machine hums on. I imagine the music it makes sounds something like Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money.”

Having a sense of style is a way of taking action. People should take fashion more seriously, not less.

Do I sound angry? I am. We consumers have been shielded from the consequences of our habits. I’m angry that the moral imperative is then heaved back onto us: We’re implored to shop responsibly, even as governments and corporations further a geopolitical setup that goads us into buying more and more stuff. I didn’t invent the Export Processing Zone. Did you?

I’m not advocating passivity. As a lover of fashion, I’d like to promote the idea that having a sense of style is a way of taking action: If you’re finicky in your taste, fussy about the way your clothes are made, and curatorial in your approach to putting together a wardrobe, that’s a pretty good defense against the temptation to buy some piece of tat, you know, just because. People should take fashion more seriously, not less.

But as worthy and as necessary as it may be to assert some rigor at the till, and consider the origins of our clothes, the actions we have to take to clean up this mess aren’t just personal. They’re political, too. Or, to put that another way: You don’t just vote with your pocketbook; you also vote with your vote. And you vote with your voice, as more than 100,000 people did when they came out for the People’s Climate March in New York City in September. We need to mobilize for change. It’s not impossible. If oil were more expensive, things would change. If companies were legally enjoined to bear the true costs of their environmental impacts—cleaning up the rivers, replanting the forests, paying for medical care in communities whose land and water have been devastated, and so on—things would change. If people demanded that trade pacts like TPP were negotiated publicly and made to include enforceable high standards regarding workers’ rights, animal welfare, and sustainability, things would change. But a mass movement is required to challenge the status quo and establish a more just system in its place. The only other option is revolution, which is just politics by other means. To paraphrase William Blake: You must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. What would Katniss Everdeen do?